Authors: Jenny Erpenbeck
The comrade who is me and Comrade B. are walking down
Tverskaya when the comrade who is me sees him. He is walking on the other side
of the street. He waves to the comrade who is me. The comrade who is me waves as
well, and I ask, Shouldn’t we call him over to our side of the street? For God’s
sake, what if someone sees us! If someone sees us, he’ll see he was only waving
to the comrade who is me. I beckon, and he comes over, B. turns away. We stroll
up and down Strastnoy several times. The conversation is superficial. We discuss
lighting, the use of a greenish light. His tone is cordial. We spend
approximately a quarter hour together. Then he says goodbye. Should it now be
considered an error that the comrade who is me and Comrade B. spoke to him? In
any case, we spoke to him.
One Wednesday, for the first time in her life, she met people
who didn’t just grumble about how awful everything was, but instead clearheadedly
investigated why this machine known as progress kept undermining the well-being of
mankind.
Otherwise, what was the point of being young in a time like this when
progress itself was still young, one of them asked — a man the others called
Comrade H. — and with a quick toss of his head, he flipped a strand of hair
off his forehead, a gesture she would later come to know so well.
It is not enough to be eighteen years old.
Now that mankind had finally, thanks to the inventions of the
modern age, acquired the means to raise itself above the limitations imposed by the
need for survival, it was now time for them to ensure that mankind was actually
taking advantage of these means, cried a pudgy comrade known as A. and he got to his
feet to describe the rising up of humanity with a powerful sweep of his arm. And
not, he went on, so as to pile up immeasurable wealth for just a few individuals,
not so as to conquer new markets and cheaper sites of production through the
subjugation of the colonies, to simply redistribute natural resources in the next
war. No! We are standing at a beginning, he exclaimed, not somewhere in the middle,
but right at the starting point — and again he scooped up a mighty armful of
air and shoved this air across to the middle of the table, dispersing the cloud of
smoke that had gathered there and sending it swirling in all directions. Then he sat
down again to roll himself a fresh cigarette.
It is not enough to be eighteen years old.
Comrade U., who spoke quietly so that people would listen to her, said,
nearly whispering, that the distribution of the generated revenues would have to be
regulated, since the moment it was possible for an individual to enrich himself,
that’s what he’d do.
Precisely, H. said, adding that it was in any case high time to take
private ownership to the cleaners, time for mankind to become one with itself, on a
truly massive scale! Those who have never been allowed to use their teeth for
anything more than biting their tongues should now be fed and allowed to digest and
grow — even to take a crap! he shouted, laughing as he bared his own teeth.
Flesh to flesh, he cried, flipping back his strand of hair.
Beautiful Z. smiled, and Comrade U., once more speaking at the edge of
audibility, opined that Comrade H. was perhaps going a bit too far, but that in
principle he was probably not wrong: the massively widespread alienation of labor
could only be a preliminary phase that would eventually lead to a world in which the
masses would also benefit from these massive quantities of labor.
Well, that’s no laughing matter, G. said, and his eye started watering
again, making it impossible to tell whether he was laughing so hard there were tears
rolling down his cheeks or perhaps crying, or neither of the two; no laughing
matter, he said, and besides: If we can tame Nature, which completely surrounds us,
surely we can prevent human selfishness from casting us back into an animal
state.
No, youth no longer existed so one could squander one’s
youth, or simply wait for the years to pass until one could eventually slip into old
age as into rags that others had worn to shreds. It no longer existed for being
ground down to make up for the failings of an older generation. Now the point of
youth was to be thrown away: for a new world such as the world had never seen
before.
They were all in a good mood, they were singing and drinking
coffee.
When I was there, all they were doing was dancing.
I can’t dance, it was a dull two hours for me.
We showed up and played cards. We didn’t have any
particular conversations.
They were already having coffee. There was no
discussion of politics at all.
V. sometimes turned up at my apartment, which I
took to mean that he liked to smoke and drink for free. I saw no political
motivation for his behavior.
And so V. was in my room on several occasions,
mainly we talked about bygone days. In early November 1935 I had one last brief
encounter with him on the street.
After the fall of 1931 I never saw him again. We
weren’t at all close, neither personally nor politically.
Once he came and sat with me as I was drinking a
glass of beer. He made a very bad impression on me. I never saw him
again.
He can’t hold his drink at all. Usually the first
glass is enough for him.
Sometimes he’s just pretending!
That’s right, I’ve seen that.
Did Comrade Br. ever run into Comrade T. at V.’s
apartment?
Not that I recall, but it’s always possible. I’d
rather err on the side of assuming he did.
Why do you consider this a possibility?
According to what I’ve heard, the two of them knew
each other.
S., L., M., and O. were once there too. A female
journalist from Sweden was there, then K. and Sch. Once H. with his wife, and
besides them, Comrade R., and Ö. with his wife — I think that’s all of
them.
I was there once, too.
Oh, right, Fr. and also C.
Pretty much everyone was tipsy.
I consider it my duty to emphatically put a stop to
these evenings, no matter how festive. When alcohol is being consumed, it is
impossible to monitor whether a political remark is being made that can no
longer be monitored.
I was at his apartment once on New Year’s Eve when
the entire place was full and there were a large number of comrades in
attendance.
Was I there?
No.
Was I there?
No.
Me?
No.
Once I went to his apartment because he had invited
me ten times.
I was off traveling all the time, so I didn’t have
any sort of relationship with V. at all.
That V. managed to escape being unmasked by us as
two-faced until the very end is of course quite disconcerting. The moral I draw
from this is that his behavior was not entirely correct.
One evening after a meeting, she had told H. about her
Sisyphus
, and he had talked to her about his plays. A few days later
the two of them went together to a gathering of so-called revolutionary writers, and
suddenly everything that had been separate for so long and separately had made no
sense fell into place. After all what did
having a world view
mean if not
learning to see? Was it possible to change the world if you found the right words?
Could the world be changed only if you happened to find them?
The question of whether Comrade O., who had written something about the
murder of Rosa Luxemburg, was permitted to describe the
Freikorps
soldier
as meticulously as she did his victim was really about whether she was allowed to
know in advance what she was writing or whether, on the contrary, it was her duty to
be constantly searching. It was also a question about the irreversibility of good
and evil, in short, fundamentally, about whether people could be educated, about
whether hope had boundaries or not. Whether this or that classic author, while
writing, was a participant in his time or whether he stood outside it as an observer
was as much a question of life and death as the question of whom the factories
belonged to. Was a revolutionary poem in sonnet form a capitulation to the enemy, a
retreat in disguise, and was poet J. — cat hair on his sweater, his teeth
brown from smoking — perhaps trying to imprison the revolution in fourteen
lines? Everything would have been different if the social-democratic pigs hadn’t
locked up our leadership back in June. Sitting in this gathering, she had felt for
the first time in her life that literature itself was something real, just as real
as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt. Here the
words themselves were something you could touch, there was no transition from
literature to what was called reality — instead, the sentences themselves were
a reality. Van Gogh had cut off his own ear, why shouldn’t it hurt just as much when
a figure in a play cut off someone else in the middle of a speech? Was it in order
to write that the Communists had come into this world? Did every word matter?
Unfortunately I was often not present at these gatherings,
because I was one of the ones who didn’t get invited. My temperament is fairly
volatile at times, and Comrade F. took such offense at my outbursts that he
called me a worm. If I were to sink to that level, I might say he was a hopeless
drunk. I won’t say that, because I don’t want to sink to his level. Of course I
make mistakes. I would like to practice ruthless self-criticism. I am insanely
despised by Comrade M. and also by Comrade C., whose garrulousness is quite
distressing to me, by the way. Now I’m having to prove that I am clean; M.
doesn’t have to prove that he is right. It upsets me when Comrade M. forgets my
name when he’s reading out the list of contributors. What an expression of
disrespect. Of course, I don’t mean to say I think he’s engaging in this sort of
politicking as an agent of fascism. I repeat that I cannot prove anything. I had
an argument with Comrade C. I began to commit errors. Suddenly, I was taking
offense at personal styles of communication, which I never would have done
before. Gossip here, gossip there, and then there was the matter at hand. If I
remember correctly, it seemed as if C. was constantly pregnant with
miscarriages. I insist that by saying these things I am not revealing anything.
I’m fighting to have someone finally tell me in a straightforward manner what is
going on. What sorts of allegations do you have against me? I am fighting for my
honor. I demand that Comrade M. stand up and explain why I wasn’t invited to
contribute. Let Comrade M. stand up and let Comrade C. be called in as well. I
know my own errors perfectly well. But I don’t want to hear the excuse that I
didn’t turn in my articles on time. I met V. here in Moscow and could smell
right away that he stank, like a dog that’s always pushing its way into things
and can’t look you in the eye. Besides, he told lies. I immediately reported
this to the cadre leadership. Every comrade has flaws, if a person says he has
no flaws, this means he hasn’t done any self-criticism. By the way: V. always
regarded me with the greatest contempt and condescension, which is something I
cannot abide, especially when there’s no call for it. In my view, it ought to be
possible to eliminate a fellow like that from the territory of the Soviet Union.
What is going on? If I speak openly now, from comrade to comrade, I might wind
up making a remark that will break my neck. Wouldn’t it be better for us to help
one another? I came to Moscow, and a tall fellow with curly hair came to see me.
An individual too dim-witted to engage in any sort of work but who is easy prey
for any counterrevolutionary element. He brought me a few poems. They were so
unbelievably bad that I felt sick to my stomach. I don’t ask to be given a medal
of honor, all I ask is that if I am going to be politically isolated, a
political explanation be given. I’m not the only one who comes into this room
and can’t shake the feeling that a couple of the people here are keeping secrets
from a third individual, or a fourth, a fifth, or sixth. The cell must demand
absolute openness. At the moment there is only a single person not trying to
play me for a sucker, and that is me.
One evening it was her turn to read a few pages aloud from
her
Sisyphus
manuscript for the first time. Sch., the man in the yellow
suit jacket — her name for him to this day — voiced the criticism that
the book centered around a petit-bourgeois main character. Was it not precisely this
petit-bourgeois indecisiveness that had caused the June Uprising to fail? Did she
mean to identify with it? What about progress? But Comrade O, the only older woman
in this circle, replied in her hoarse voice that it was progress when one paid heed
to the truth, as this young author was most certainly doing. Before striding off
upon a new path, must one not have acquired a profound understanding of what was
wrong with the old one? Sallow, mustached K. replied with a certain acerbity: Of
course you can invest a great deal of effort into always trying to understand
everything, but we would still be tugging away at the Gordian Knot if it hadn’t
occurred to someone to just slice through it. J., a poet — cat hair on his
sweater, his teeth brown from smoking — said that he particularly liked the
leisurely pace of her storytelling, and the many repetitions, because they reflected
the stagnation from which the book’s hero suffered. Exactly, H. said: for once a
story was being told via the language as well and not just the plot — and if
they, the revolutionary authors, really were hoping to create a new Adam, the only
clay they had at their disposal was language! His strand of hair fell in his face,
but he didn’t notice. Hereupon Comrade T., raising her voice more than was necessary
to be heard in this small gathering, declared that when an author resorted to
gimmicks to make the reader pay attention to the writing, the text lost all power to
point to something beyond itself, and she found that a shame. Not a shame, sallow,
mustached K. added, but possibly dangerous, because a person who is enjoying
something stays right where he is and stops moving forward. Had she been writing at
the brink of an abyss, and just in time found friends who could drag her back from
its edge? Had her text, which she had written in isolation, now been transformed
into something that — through all these critiques and expressions of support
— would bind her to these friends more intimately than a kiss might among
young people who were merely eighteen years old? She was hurt by what Comrade T.
said, while H.’s words, spoken this time without flipping the hair out of his face,
sent happiness coursing dizzily through her body down to her fingertips, but neither
Comrade T. nor H. was indifferent to what she thought and wondered. Indifference did
not exist within this circle; here, every word mattered.
It is not enough to be
eighteen years old.